Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 07:11, Johnny Hughes wrote:
>
>>>If you managed a set of servers running homegrown code that
>>>may or may not be sensitive to library and utility program
>>
>>You would run a local mirror that only had the updates you tested on
>>it :)
>
> Local to what? The production boxes are distributed but have good
> internet connectivity. The test box only has so-so internet
local to your organisation. If you do have good connectivity, forking
out for an extra role machine should not be an issue. I fail to see how
bandwidth has anything to do with yum. no matter what package manager
you use, you are going to need to pull down the same packages....
Any system admin who needs such solid control on the package tree's will
host his/her own repository of packages, sometimes even a bunch ( eg.
based on intended system role ) and run an automated delivery mechanism.
Also, are you saying that you admin a large number of machines, and dont
actually test the packages before they are rolled out ?
> connectivity. Isn't having to do that an admission that yum
> doesn't really do a good job of managing the packages you
> want on a box?
there is yumlib, now available. Feel free to hack away.... A lot of the
'home grown' scripts that I have seen out there are screen-scrapers....
which by default, are locked into the specific version/setup of yum
anyway. Its stupid to think that those sort of scripts are ever going to
maintain functionality across versions.
btw, you could always go 'basic' and use a bunch of includepkgs and
excludepkgs directives in your yum.conf :) and have that rsync over to
all the various machines on a scheduled basis.
> Actually I think some invocation of rpm -q will give a list
> of installed packages that you can feed to yum to install on
you mean something like
rpm -qp *.rpm --qf "%{name}.%{arch} "
which should give you a list of packages... easy to feed that to a yum
install process...
> another machine, but it is not at all intuitive. Don't the
> people writing package management tools actually manage any
> machines or understand that keeping them identical is
> desirable?
If a couple of hundred machines counts as 'machines', then yes - the
people I know - working on these package management tools do indeed
manage machines.
perhaps, this conversation needs to move to the yum-devel list, where
you can then recommend ways to make yum more user-friendly.
- K
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Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/
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